A build is a moment. An AI system is a thing that keeps running after you stop looking at it, and that is exactly when it starts to drift. The intake wizard that classified leads perfectly in March quietly mislabels them by June because the questions people ask have changed. Nobody notices until a deal lands in the wrong pile.
This is the retainer for the part nobody quotes. It is not a support contract for bugs. It is an owner for the system after launch.
What you get every month:
- The system stays mine to worry about. One production AI system, agent, automation, intake flow, or cron, that I keep running, patched, and pointed at the right model.
- A real audit, not a status light. Once a month I check what it actually produced and tell you where it was wrong and why. The reasoning is the deliverable. A dashboard that says "healthy" is the thing that hides the problem.
- One new thing a quarter. The system should be more useful in month nine than it was at launch. Each quarter it gets one new automation or capability, scoped with you.
- You hear about drift first. When a provider changes a model, or your data shifts under the system, that is a message from me, not a surprise from a client.
I price this as one number, $3,500 a month, because predictable beats hourly and because the value is in the watching, not the hours. It is the named successor to a project: when a build ships, this is what it becomes. Not an upsell you opt into later, the default next step you can opt out of.
I keep these deliberately small. I am one person, the systems are real, and I would rather run a handful well than a roomful badly. If your system is stable and genuinely needs nothing, I will tell you to drop the retainer. The point is for it to earn its place every month.
Pairs with Operations Infrastructure when the AI lives inside a portal I built, and with AI Tooling & Automations when you want the system in the first place.